by Janet Neel
‘Going to St Mary’s,’ the driver called to McLeish, as he pulled out. McLeish nodded, and stood for a moment working out what to do next.
‘Anyone see the attack?’ he enquired generally of Perry’s motley retinue who were arranged variously around the car and on the steps of the house.
‘No.’ The pony-tailed driver-cum-bodyguard was white with shock and rage. ‘I can’t think why Sheena went outside — we’d told her not to, and I’d have gone for whatever she wanted. She can’t drive. All I heard was a scream and a thud, and I didn’t think it had anything to do with us anyway. I did go and look straight-away though,’ he added, catching McLeish’s cold eye. ‘But it took a minute to work out what I’d heard, know what I mean?’
McLeish established that he was talking to one Michael Howden, commonly known as Biff. ‘Why did Mrs Byers go outside?’
‘You mean Sheena? I dunno. She was sitting there, then she said, shit, she’d forgotten something, and went out the room. She never came back and we heard this scream.’
‘She was getting something from the car, wasn’t she?’ volunteered another member of the entourage. McLeish nodded and walked round to look at the car. Just inside the passenger door, on the ample floor, lay a briefcase, with the familiar EIIR device showing clearly in the street lights. He squinted round to look at the label without touching the case. ‘F. M. Wilson, Department of Trade and Industry’: of course – Francesca’s case. Who else in that group would carry a Governmentissue briefcase?
‘Francesca,’ he said to Davidson, assailed by a cold panic.
‘Thought of that,’ Davidson said. ‘We can be wrong all the way after all. No answer from the phone, so I’ve asked the uniformed boys to go round and ring the bell. And camp on her doorstep, if need be.’
‘Look.’ It was the pony-tailed Biff, intelligence taking over from rage. ‘He was after Sheena, wasn’t he? He can’t have got round to Francesca as well in the time. She’s at the American Embassy, I took her there — you could ring them up.’
McLeish looked under his eyelashes at Davidson, who nodded slightly, meaning that was in hand.
‘Why didn’t Sheena ask me to get the flaming briefcase?’
‘Did she forget to do it earlier, and not feel like asking you?’ McLeish asked thoughtfully, and Biff nodded.
‘That’ll be it,’ he said, with conviction. ‘That’s what she did, she remembered, and she felt badly, so she went to get it herself, forgetting we’d told her not to go out on her own.’
Yes, well, thought McLeish as he drove off to St Mary’s, that was all straightforward enough, but where was Francesca? Did Embassy dinners really go on until 12.30, or had she run into trouble on the way home? Well, the uniformed branch were looking for her and he had a job to do, and he drove through the night trying to suppress the inward vision of Francesca, huddled as Sheena had been, in a pool of blood.
Two hours later the position was wholly unimproved. None of Perry’s retinue, nor Perry himself had seen either the attack or the attacker. Mr Byers had been dragged protesting from his bed at around 2 a.m., and, having no alibi and plenty of time in which to have got home after any assault, was residing in the cells at Edgware Road, refusing to answer any questions whatsoever without the presence of his solicitor. Sheena, deeply unconscious, was in intensive care. Francesca had apparently vanished into thin air, the dinner at the Embassy having decorously concluded towards midnight. It was now two and a half hours after that time, but she had not returned home, nor, as McLeish grimly supposed must be some consolation, been found lying in a pool of blood anywhere. He put his head down on the table and fell instantly asleep, an ability which most policemen acquire early as an alternative to leaving the force.
An hour later McLeish forced himself to the surface, with Davidson’s voice in his ear.
‘The good news is that we’ve found her, and she’s perfectly safe. She spent the evening since leaving the Embassy under the eyes of six of the Special Branch’s finest, and she is on the way home now with one of their drivers.’
McLeish rubbed his eyes, feeling tears of tiredness and relief not far below the surface. Then he remembered Davidson’s preamble. ‘And the bad news?’
‘Ah.’ Davidson, uninvited, sat down on the opposite side of the desk, swinging his legs, half turned to the door. ‘The Special Branch were not, of course, laid on to look after Miss Wilson, but to ensure the safety of Senator Michael O’Brien — ye mind who he is? Yes, well he is apparently an old friend of Miss Wilson’s and they went on for a wee dram at the Dorchester where he and his people are staying.’
Addressing the door rather than McLeish, he added that the Special Branch laddie, sensing some personal interest, had volunteered that it had been arranged well in advance that Miss Wilson would join the party, and that a driver had been on standby to take her home in the early hours of the morning. The Special Branch laddie had no doubt felt himself to be helpful in volunteering this entirely gratuitous information.
‘No doubt.’ McLeish sourly digested this unwelcome piece of news. He had been experienced enough to realize that there was another man currently in his Francesca’s life, but that adult realization did not save him from a pang of misery when the other man materialized quite so specifically.
‘Coffee?’ Davidson suggested helpfully, as a way of getting himself momentarily out of the room. By the time he returned he was relieved to see that his boss was looking no worse than grim.
‘He should have driven her home himself,’ he observed to the returning Davidson.
‘She likely told him not to be so silly, the driver could perfectly well take her, do you not think?’
One forgot, McLeish thought, considering his sergeant with respect, the extent of his experience with women. ‘Did she know we were checking up on her?’
‘There was no way of avoiding asking her where she had been. She shouldn’t know that the laddie from Special Branch gave out her programme for the rest of the evening.’
‘I suspect she’ll have guessed,’ McLeish acknowledged reluctantly. ‘She’s used to a bureaucracy all gossiping to each other. She’ll assume we know exactly what time she went home, and where from.’
Davidson grinned at the vision of the Department of Trade and Industry implied by McLeish’s views, but had to agree that he was probably right. An interesting social problem that would involve for McLeish when he next met Francesca. He could see his boss thinking the same.
‘Have you spoken to her?’
‘Aye, I did. Special Branch have phones in all their cars. She intends to get up at 8 a.m. and go to work, so I persuaded her to stay home and call the hospital rather than to go there and hold her brother’s hand.’
McLeish reflected respectfully that Francesca must be both tough and conscientious. Most girls, and indeed quite a few men, would be late in to work after getting home at 3 in the morning, particularly in circumstances which he found himself unwilling to consider too closely.
‘I take it our man is in place now? Both she and her brother ought to be guarded, even if we are locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.’
‘We have the horse under guard, ye remember. And he has no alibi at all.’
‘That’s very odd.’ McLeish spoke slowly, and Davidson sank back on to the desk.
‘You’re right. I must be tired. If he were going to do it he’d have arranged for all his family and every associate not currently inside to have been with him at the material time. Probably celebrating the birthday of his wee grey-haired mother.’
Both men sat and considered the other possibilities. ‘He hired it done?’ Davidson suggested tentatively.
‘Perhaps, but I would have expected him to do the wife himself, and hire someone to do the other bloke, wouldn’t you?’
Davidson gave him a sidelong look. ‘In similar circumstances I should have felt it my duty to do them both myself,’ he said, primly, restoring McLeish to good humour.
‘I do apolo
gize, Bruce. It’s the low moral standards of the decadent South that are beginning to undermine me.’
‘Ah well, ye’ve been here all your life, it can’t be helped. Ye need to find a nice Scots lass to marry.’
‘I’m trying to, even if she is only a half Scot.’ McLeish spoke evenly, and Davidson’s eyebrows shot up. He watched his boss, momentarily gravelled for words, but McLeish was reading the case report with such concentration that Davidson knew he might as well not have been in the room. He cleared his throat.
‘Ye went out with her on Saturday?’
McLeish stopped reading. ‘Yes, I did. We went to the cinema, where she held my hand in the frightening bits, and I kissed her goodnight on the doorstep.’ He returned forbiddingly to the papers.
‘Whoever-it-was hit Mrs Byers over the head as she was bending to fetch something from the car, they reckon. That will have been Francesca’s briefcase. She must have left it in the car by accident. Biff Howden had been sent to pick Francesca up from her train and get her to the party. She changed at the Embassy. Now why was she particularly concerned? What was she carrying?’
Davidson riffled through his own notes. ‘Confidential information on the company she had been visiting in Yorkshire — Britex Fabrics. She was particularly concerned, she said, because it was not just commercially confidential material but the company is quoted on the Stock Market and it would have been particularly damaging to have information leak out ahead of the Annual Report.’ He looked hopefully at McLeish to see if any of that helped, and saw his boss freeze in thought, all the personality concentrated on chasing an idea, the wide shoulders hunched over the desk which always looked too small for him, hazel eyes narrowed in concentration.
‘Is it possible that someone was looking for that material? I know you think I have an obsession with the Fireman case, but it is wrong as it stands. If someone at Britex is involved, then they were after Francesca’s briefcase rather than Mrs Byers. Will she be asleep?’ McLeish had his hand on the phone, as Davidson struggled to think. ‘I’ll try anyway.’ He hesitated. ‘No I won’t, I’ll go and get her at 8 a.m.’
The phone rang sharply and his eyebrows went up as he listened to the message. ‘Yes, put her on. It’s Francesca,’ he observed to Davidson, who rose to creep out of the room, only to be told impatiently to sit down again, he needed to hear this.
‘John McLeish here.’ Davidson watched his chief with admiration as he ploughed firmly on into the conversation. ‘Yes, we do have a guard on Peregrine and there is one outside your door, too. Look, Mrs Byers was attacked while hunting for your briefcase. What was in it?’ He moved the phone sharply away from his ear to avoid being deafened by the wail of misery from the other end.
‘I cannot bear it. I was truly grateful to that tiresome girl for being both civil and understanding about the nonsense I had made, and for trotting off kindly to look for my case. I went back to drink my coffee with my mind at rest, and she went out and was as near murdered as makes no difference. I’ve just talked to Perry — the doctors are warning him about brain damage. It was bad enough if I had been the cause of her running into an irate and murderous husband when she might otherwise have been safe, but if she was hurt because of something in my case, it is too awful. What will Perry do?’
‘Francesca!’ McLeish, miserable for her, still recognized incipient hysteria when he heard it. ‘Will you calm down and concentrate? Shall I come and fetch you and we can talk down here?’ He listened patiently while Francesca got herself under control.
‘Sorry,’ she said, after a bit. ‘It’s been a long evening.’
McLeish heard the attempt at bravado and his mouth quirked, but he resisted the temptation to comment.
‘But I expect you know that?’ The bravado was now very marked. ‘I do think someone might have got a message to me — I’d have come straight to the hospital to keep Perry company at least.’
‘We had a little difficulty finding you,’ McLeish observed drily, realizing as he spoke that she would have abandoned a lover without a backward glance if she had thought that her brother needed her. ‘Why don’t you go to bed now and we’ll send a driver up for you in the morning?’
‘You are kind,’ she said, in tones suggesting the exact opposite. ‘I must sleep now because I am working in a few hours. I will gladly come to the station, rather than talk on the phone about the company. You may not believe it from this evening’s performance but I am normally — we all are — very careful about chatting casually about quoted companies. Yes, please, a driver would be quicker, there never are any taxis round here.’
‘Eight o’clock, then.’ McLeish rang off, and his sergeant volunteered hastily to go and fetch her.
‘No, I’ll do it. May as well sort this out quickly.’ He looked enquiringly at Davidson who was looking uneasy. ‘I’m not going to ask her about the other bloke, I just think I ought to see her again soon before she gets jumpy.’
He collected papers and strode out of the office, leaving Davidson feeling, as he often did, that a high wind had whistled past his head. He wondered how Francesca was going to receive McLeish in this masterful and uncompromising mood. Poorly, he rather thought, being herself accustomed to command.
He walked heavily out of the office, to find McLeish hunched over an early edition of the Daily Mail, according it his usual obliterating concentration. He glanced over McLeish’s shoulder at the front page to be met by an excellent photograph of Francesca laughing up at the junior Senator from West Virginia. They made an absolute contrast in type, the Senator with the square-cut Irish features running to fat round the jowls, an easy-going man who sat light to his responsibilities, and Francesca’s austere Norman face which even in laughter looked serious and conscientious. Too serious, he thought, and much improved by the company of what was all too clearly not a serious man. He became aware at this point in his reflections that McLeish was speaking and recovered himself.
‘Very good photo,’ he pointed out. McLeish ignored this offering completely and, speaking slowly and carefully, told him to call the hospital again to find out if there was any change in Sheena Byers’s condition. ‘If that isn’t too much trouble?’
Davidson, who thought on the whole he had deserved it, accepted this treatment with equanimity, ignoring sympathetic looks from the desk sergeant. ‘See you later in the day, sir,’ he called after the retreating McLeish.
11
McLeish, greeting Francesca at 8 a.m. on the dot, thought she looked ill and tired, not at all like a girl who had spent half the night in the arms of a lover. She greeted him warily, reminding him painfully of a child who is not quite sure how cross her parents are going to be. He decided to treat her very carefully indeed, and guided her to the car, chatting about the weather. In this spirit he helped her into her seat and switched on the car radio, with Francesca watching him as if he were a time bomb. The radio promptly undid his plans.
‘Senator Michael O’Brien leaves for Hamburg from Heathrow today,’ the announcer recorded. ‘He is to visit five European capitals in an effort to solve the problems being caused for the steel industry in the USA by recent Common Market action.’
McLeish froze in his seat, not daring to look sideways.
‘I see you have the James Miles Brett tape.’ Francesca, sounding as cool and as distant as a visiting duchess, waved the cassette. ‘Might I put it on?’
‘Sure. Yes. Of course.’ He took it from her left-handed, still not daring to look at her, slammed it into the deck, cutting the announcer off in mid-recital of Michael O’Brien’s political history and future prospects. The pure rounded treble filled the car.
‘It is a staggering voice,’ he volunteered cautiously after a few minutes. ‘Like a lark.’ Receiving no answer, he cautiously slewed his eyes towards his passenger who was gazing out of her window. Something in the rigidity of her shoulders told him she was weeping, and his throat tightened with pity for her and pain for himself and his halfformed hopes.
‘Francesca,’ he said, all plans abandoned, ‘don’t cry. He’ll be back some time, won’t he?’
‘I haven’t got a handkerchief.’ He fished out a box of Kleenex and thrust it anxiously at her, passing the station as quickly as possible and starting another circuit. She blew her nose thoroughly, and scrubbed at her face.
‘Could we just stop for a minute?’ McLeish halted abruptly and reached to turn off the tape, but she stopped him, and turned it down only so that they spoke against the background of the marvellous voice singing a Bach cantata. He was relieved to see that she was no longer weeping.
‘That affair is over, but anyone who I — that is, anyone who is going to be a friend, needs to understand about Michael and me. He virtually saved my life, or at least my self-esteem, when my marriage foundered. He’s a good friend and a sensible man.’ She sniffed. ‘I suppose he taught me to take life a bit more easily, that people, particularly men, were not irreplaceable.’
‘Like buses.’
‘What? Oh yes, I see, there’ll always be another one coming along.’ She grinned, recovering fast, he noticed, even the dark hair looking less flattened. ‘Did you invite me here to assist you with your enquiries, and if so, hadn’t we better get on with it?’
McLeish nodded, ‘I’m making for the station. We need a full statement from you. I believe this attack on Mrs Byers links to the murder we had last Monday.’
‘I haven’t been able to think of anything else all night. I called the hospital this morning and spoke to Perry. Sheena is a little better, not conscious or anything, but giving less anxiety. Perry spent the hours of darkness summoning top surgeons from America. I imagine he is wildly popular at St Mary’s by now.’
She blew her nose again, and turned the driver’s mirror to examine her eyes. McLeish patiently rescued it from her, noticing again that she seemed to lack practical sense, for all the brains. He let her out of the car after watching her engage in her usual fight with the door handle, and they marched in soberly side by side to greet Bruce Davidson, also red-eyed and tired. She smiled at him and gave him the better news of Sheena.